The UK Treasury considers John Maynard Keynes to be an idiot. He famously said that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity”. The Treasury rejects this view. As so often before, it is wrong.

This debate of the 1930s has been reborn, with Keynes’ role being taken by the International Monetary Fund. In April’s World Economic Outlook, the IMF stated that in the UK, “where recovery is weak owing to lacklustre demand, consideration should be given to greater near-term flexibility in the fiscal adjustment path”. Read more

On Monday 13th May, I participated in a debate on austerity organised by the New York Review of Books, held in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. The motion was: “Austerity in the Eurozone and the UK: Kill or Cure?”. Those arguing in defence of austerity were Meghnad (Lord) Desai and Sir John Redwood MP. On my side was Lord (Robert) Skidelsky. Here is the speech I presented – a version of which was published in the New York Review of Books, July 11, 2013, Volume 60, Number 12. It can also be found at www.nybooks.com.Read more

Humanity has decided to yawn and let the real and present dangers of climate change mount. That was the argument I made in last week’s column. Nothing in the responses to it undermined that conclusion. If anything, they reinforced it. Judged by the world’s inaction, climate sceptics have won. That makes their sense of grievance more remarkable. For the rest of us, the question that remains is whether anything can still be done and, if so, what?

In considering this issue, a rational person should surely recognise the extent of the consensus of climate scientists on the hypothesis of man-made warming. An analysis of abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed scientific papers, published between 1991 and 2011 and written by 29,083 authors, concludes that 98.4 per cent of authors who took a position endorsed man-made (anthropogenic) global warming, 1.2 per cent rejected it and 0.4 per cent were uncertain. Similar ratios emerged from alternative analyses of the data. Read more

The UK Treasury is, it is reported, considering the sale of parts of its student loan book. This provokes a big question: when should the UK government sell such an asset – given that it is both immortal and solvent?

The best answer has two parts. First, it must be believed that the asset would be better managed by the private sector. And, second, it must be believed that this superior private management can only be introduced by selling the assets – rather than introducing some type of private management contract.Read more

Last week the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was reported to have passed 400 parts per million for the first time in 4.5m years. It is also continuing to rise at a rate of about 2 parts per million every year. On the present course, it could be 800 parts per million by the end of the century. Thus, all the discussions of mitigating the risks of catastrophic climate change have turned out to be empty words.

Collectively, humanity has yawned and decided to let the dangers mount. Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College in London, notes that when the concentrations were last this high, “the world was warmer on average by three or four degrees Celsius than it is today. There was no permanent ice sheet on Greenland, sea levels were much higher, and the world was a very different place, although not all of these differences may be directly related to CO2 levels.” Read more

A commenter, A.N., objects to my argument that the big reason for the explosion in government bond yields in Spain was not its debt dynamics, which are remarkably like the UK’s, but because it does not have a lender of last resort, as the UK does.

He responds that the debt dynamics of France and Germany were just like Spain’s. But they were not similarly punished. In any case, the facts are clearly otherwise. These are the relevant data for the three mentioned countries. It is quite clear that Spanish debt dynamics are far worse than those of France and Germany.Read more

As it happens Michael Pettis, professor at Peking University, and author of the excellent book, The Great Rebalancing (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013) has a complementary post.

In this, he argues that Spain had no choice over what happened to it during the 2000-07 period, given the deliberate policies of Germany, which were aimed at generating a large current account surplus (“improving competitiveness” being the normal way of talking about this form of structural mercantilism). If one’s principal trading partner is seeking to generate a huge current account surplus and so exporting capital, he argues, then a country is effectively forced into running the counterpart deficits, whatever the consequences.

I agree with this analysis of what happened. Indeed, I have argued along these lines for several years, in trying to explain the roots of the eurozone crisis, which is a balance-of-payments cum financial crisis, of which fiscal deficits are a symptom, not, except in the case of Greece, a cause.Read more

My column this week was on Germany’s attempt to export the German model throughout the eurozone. Here is some additional information on what has been happening. The story is quite remarkable for the scale of the shift towards private sector frugality across the crisis-hit countries.

The chart below is derived from the data on the fiscal and current account balances in the latest database of the Intenational Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook. By definition, the private sector financial balance (the difference between income and spending) must equal the general government balance (difference between receipts and spending) and the foreign balance (the net capital flow). The net capital flow is the inverse of the current account. So a country with a current account deficit has a capital account surplus, by definition – it is receiving more capital from abroad than it exports. Read more

What is to be done? This question has to be asked of UK economic policy. Only the complacent can be satisfied with what is happening. Yes, the 1 per cent increase in third-quarter gross domestic product is welcome. But GDP stagnated over four quarters and was 3.1 per cent lower than in the first quarter of 2008.

I remain convinced that the decision to move towards fiscal austerity so sharply in 2010 was a huge error. A salient aspect of the mistake was that the UK reinforced the move towards austerity in the EU. In an article entitled “Self-defeating austerity?” published in the October National Institute Economic Review, Dawn Holland and Jonathan Portes argue that UK GDP could well be 4.3 per cent lower this year and 5 per cent lower in 2013 than it would have been without these consolidation programmes, including the UK’s. Moreover, in 2013 the UK’s ratio of public sector debt to GDP might be 5 percentage points higher than it would have been without the co-ordinated contraction. This is a step forward and maybe two steps back.

I entered into a heated US debate last week on whether the recovery has been surprisingly slow and, if so, whether the policies of Barack Obama’s administration bear responsibility for that outcome. In particular, I was responding to a post by John Taylor of Stanford University, a distinguished macroeconomist and adviser to Mitt Romney, who had argued that the recovery was exceptionally weak.

I have argued in previous posts that the policy of letting the government deficits offset the natural post-crisis austerity of the private sector makes excellent sense, provided the country in question has a solvent government. I have argued, too, in the most recent post, that the objections to this policy are not decisive. What matters is making the best of bad alternatives.

Yet let us also look at alternative ways of accelerating deleveraging. Broadly there are two: capital transactions and default. The latter, in turn, comes in two varieties: plain vanilla default and inflationary default. Read more

In the previous three posts in this series, I have argued that large fiscal deficits are a more or less inevitable concomitant of post-financial crisis deleveraging by the private sector. Moreover, I have argued, substituting a solvent debtor (the government or taxpayers, in general) for insolvent (or illiquid) private ones is feasible and desirable in an economy going through a balance-sheet recession. It is therefore quite possible to get out of debt by going into it, because they are not the same debtors. And the distribution of the debt, not its level, is what matters.

Needless to say, arguments can be made against this point of view and alternative policies considered. But, before considering those arguments and alternatives, it is crucial to stress one point: no pain-free escapes from the consequences of a huge credit boom and consequent private sector debt overhang exist. We are trading off bad alternatives. Read more

“You can’t get out of debt by adding more debt.” How often have you read this sentence? It is a cliché. I am going to argue that, to a first approximation, this obvious, even banal, statement is the reverse of the truth, which is that the only way to get out of debt is to add more debt. What matters is who adds the debt and in what form. To put it more bluntly, it depends on who these“you” are.

As I have done in two previous posts on the theme of “balance-sheet recessions”, I am going to focus on the US, because it is the most important country now going through the post-crisis deleveraging process.

Let us start with an obvious and crucial fact: at the world level, net debt is zero. For an individual country, net debt is how much foreigners have lent to residents less how much residents have lent to foreigners. In the case of the US, net debt at the end of 2011 was 44 per cent of GDP, roughly an eighth of gross debt. Read more

Economic crises bring forth a great deal of nonsense. One of the most frequent bits of such nonsense is the idea that the countries in crisis in the eurozone are full of idle people, while the countries that are not in crisis are full of hard-working ones.

This, it so happens, is the reverse of the truth. Indeed, if one went by the hours worked on average by each worker, one would conclude that the fewer hours people work, the less crisis-prone will be the country.

Here is a relevant chart for the eurozone, which comes from the Conference Board database I have frequently used. The reader will note that the crisis-hit countries are in the middle or right of the chart. (I have excluded former communist countries, which have somewhat different characteristics: most are much poorer than those listed below. But, again, the people in crisis-hit ex-communist countries, such as Estonia and Latvia, tended to work long hours.) Read more

I look at this through the lens of “sectoral financial balances”, an analytical framework learned from the work of the late Wynne Godley. The essential idea is that since income has to equal expenditure for the economy, as a whole, (which is the same things as saying that saving equals investment) so the sums of the difference between income and expenditures of each of the sectors of the economy must also be zero. These differences can also be described as “financial balances”. Thus, if a sector is spending less than its income it must be accumulating (net) claims on other sectors.

The crucial point is that, since sectoral balances must sum to zero, a rise in the deficit of one sector must be matched by an offsetting change in the others. It follows that if the fiscal deficit is increasing, the sum of the surpluses of the other sectors of the economy must be increasing in a precisely offsetting manner. Read more

The chart attached to the column showed the cumulative total of gross private sector debt, relative to gross domestic product. In the chart below, I show total debt, including government debt, relative to GDP. The reader will notice that the economy as a whole has deleveraged, despite the rising debt of the government. Read more

On June 14 2012, I wrote a column [Two cheers for Britain’s bank reform plans] on the government’s plans to implement the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Banking, chaired by Sir John Vickers, of which I was a member.

I noted that the government had rejected the Commission’s recommendations on several points, in favour of the banks. After the scandal of the deliberate misreporting of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), these concessions must now be reconsidered. Read more

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On this blog, I will open the discussion of a topic that I am thinking about. My aim will be to elicit views of readers. I will give my own response to the question I have raised, before posting the next issue for discussion.

Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, London. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 “for services to financial journalism”. Mr Wolf is an honorary fellow of Nuffield College and of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is also an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham. He has been a forum fellow at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos since 1999 and a member of its International Media Council since 2006.

Martin was made a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, by Nottingham University in July 2006 and a Doctor of Science (Economics) of London University, honoris causa, by the London School of Economics in December 2006. He was joint winner of the 2009 award for columns in “giant newspapers” at the 15th annual Best in Business Journalism competition of The Society of American Business Editors and Writers and won the 32nd Ischia International Journalism Prize in 2012. Martin's most recent publications are Why Globalization Works and Fixing Global Finance.